I sit 33,000 feet in the air as I write this. I’m on a flight between Charlotte and Dallas, where we will refuel and then onto Hawaii. Thus far, it’s not been a great experience. I forgot how much I hate flying and how inconvenient it is. The horrible thing is that once we take off from Dallas, around 2 p.m. their time, It’s still roughly another 8.5 hours on top of the 4 we have already travelled. I’m hoping that disassociation thing I can usually do on flights kicks in, but when somebody in my family wants something, I’m bumped out of whatever stupor I’ve created.
The WiFi on this plane sucks. We cannot use any streaming services, so there’s no Netflix or Hulu. I did an Internet speed test and it’s about 1/5th what it is for downloads when I’m home and about 1/20th what it should be for uploads. WiFi wasn’t happening on planes six years ago, when my trip to rehab – my last excursion on a jet. Ironic I’m flying back into the same airport, DFW.
It Will Get Better on This Trip
Yeah, the cramped seats, lack of food and general malaise that hangs over a group of people who know they’re stuck together for 10 hours is thick here, but I realize tomorrow at this time it’ll be 7:37 a.m. in Hawaii and I’ll probably be waking up and ready for a beach day in paradise. The hell I’m going through right now will be a memory that I can laugh about because it’s over.
So, as I was typing this, we hit turbulence and were told to put our electronic devices away. It took so long, that I told myself I’d get back to this, but the long, long day was just beginning. We were grounded (on the plane) in Dallas for over two hours and by the time we got to Honolulu, got to the hotel, had something resembling dinner and got to bed, 23 hours had elapsed, with 21 of them being in daylight. That’s kinda weird because it throws off your timing. I’m writing this now five days later on Monday and I’m still up every morning at 5 a.m.
I’m not going to run through the last five days, but I do want to point to one thing I did which is very unlike me. On our second full day here, we went deep sea fishing. Or, as it will be remembered, deep sea projectile vomiting. I’m sorry east coasters, our Atlantic Ocean has nothing on the Pacific. It was a beautiful day but we still hit 10-15 foot swells. And, when you’re bent over the side of a boat doing your business, there’s a whole other dimension to throwing up when waves are smacking you in the side of the head. I remember a moment of clarity where I said to myself, “This is really different than what I was doing last week at this time. At least I’m still in Hawaii.”
Getting Our Hawaii Days In
So that day wasn’t good and we all felt under the weather the next day. So, Saturday night I made the decision to extend the trip. I told everybody to get off work, school, whatever it took. We were going to have a re-do on those two days. If you’re only spending 6 days in Hawaii, you can’t lose two of them. I called everyone I needed to call and booked what I needed to book.
This is what I mean about balance. In a former life, I would have paid for the cheap room facing the mountains and just chalked up the bad experience to luck. Now, I got the expensive room facing the beach and we’re going to get our days in, dammit. If Mother Nature isn’t providing balance, sometimes you have to put your thumb on the scale.
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I can feel your pain with the barfing off the boat. Never fun.